Uncertainty-Aware Prediction of Lung Tumor Growth from Sparse Longitudinal CT Data via Bayesian Physics-Informed Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Bayesian physics-informed neural network for predicting lung tumor growth from sparse CT data, providing accurate forecasts with uncertainty estimates.

Contribution

It combines Gompertz growth dynamics with Bayesian inference and a two-stage sampling strategy to improve tumor growth prediction under limited data.

Findings

Model captures heterogeneous growth patterns.

Achieves a cohort-level log-space RMSE of ~0.20.

Provides well-calibrated uncertainty intervals.

Abstract

This work studies lung tumor growth prediction from sparse and irregular longitudinal computed tomography (CT) observations with measurement variability. A Bayesian physics-informed neural network is developed by combining Gompertz growth dynamics with low-dimensional Bayesian inference in the log-volume domain. The framework employs a two-stage inference strategy combining maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) sampling to estimate posterior predictive distributions and uncertainty intervals. The method was evaluated on longitudinal data from the National Lung Screening Trial (30 patients). Results show that the model captures heterogeneous tumor growth patterns while maintaining reasonable prediction accuracy under limited observations. Compared with deterministic modeling approaches, the proposed approach additionally provides calibrated uncertainty estimates. The inferred posterior parameter correlations were consistent with expected biological growth behavior. The proposed framework achieved a cohort-level log-space RMSE of approximately 0.20 together with well-calibrated 95% credible interval coverage across 30 patients. These findings suggest that Bayesian physics-informed modeling may be useful for uncertainty-aware tumor growth assessment when only limited longitudinal follow-up scans are available.